Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI), a tech program for rising college freshman, just celebrated its 10th summer. To mark this milestone, today we’re featuring Adela and Jessica, two CSSI participants. We’re proud of how this program has impacted the hundreds of students who have experienced its magic, and hope you enjoy their stories. Read on!

Adela Chavez, Los Angeles CSSI participant

Despite facing many challenges, including homelessness, Adela has never stopped chasing her dreams. While balancing a job and caring for her siblings, she also began learning about computer science and exploring coding. In the future, she hopes to be a mentor to others with similarly difficult backgrounds.

Jessica Morales-Mendoza, Seattle CSSI participant

Jessica has overcome obstacles throughout her life, as well. Coming from a low-income household of seven, she has found time to not only care for many of her siblings, but to also participate in robotics and programming at her school. Going forward, her dream is to work for the FBI’s Cyber Security Unit.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Adela:

I want to make an impact. I want to be the reason that someone gains the confidence to follow their dreams. I have gone through plenty of hardships in my life, whether it was having to work when I was just 15 years old to help alleviate family expenses, having to stay up all night to take care of my siblings while my mother and sister worked the graveyard shift, or even being homeless at times during my senior year. If it weren't for the people who believed in me and gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams, I don't think I would be here today.

Jessica:

I grew up in a low-income, immigrant household of seven in Los Angeles, CA. At the age of thirteen, due to a family circumstance, I had to mature and be the older sister when I was actually one of the youngest. My parents were depressed and had fallen into alcoholism, while my brother was struggling with drug addiction.

During that very difficult part of my life, I began participating in afterschool programs, including robotics and game jams hosted by my CS (computer science) teachers. I discovered that programming has a lot of purposes, from creating robots, bringing crazy ideas to life, stopping cyber crimes and more.

In the fall, I will begin attending California State University, Los Angeles. I am passionate about helping others succeed, especially those from tough financial situations or circumstances. Besides that, I am obsessed with aliens and UFOs!

What motivated you to apply to CSSI?

Adela:

For me, it was when I realized that computer science provided a way for me to escape poverty and secure a career that I was interested in. I knew that this path would allow me to create programs that could provide help for those who need it.

However, going into CSSI, I wasn’t entirely sure if computer science was for me. I knew that it had many interesting aspects, but I wanted to get more hands-on experience before making a final decision. After the incredible experiences I had at CSSI, I am now 100% ready to dedicate myself to this field.

Jessica:

I actually found out about CSSI when I was applying to Google’s Generation Scholarship. After reading the program description, I was hooked! When I first applied, I didn’t really think I had a chance of getting accepted (imposter syndrome), but I’m so glad that I went ahead and applied anyway. If I hadn’t taken a chance on it, I would’ve missed out on so much.

What do you wish you’d known before you arrived at Google for CSSI?

Adela:

That it’s okay to ask for help. Growing up, I was the first in my family to go beyond middle school and take difficult classes, so I was always forced to figure things out on my own. I wasn't used to asking for help or admitting when I didn't know what was going on.

When I came into this program and actually learned that asking for help is encouraged, I initially struggled to accept it, which might have prevented me from fully understanding what was being taught. Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to get the most out of the program, I had to start asking for help.

Jessica:

I wish I’d known how hard it would be to leave this amazing experience! The amount of tears falling from our faces when it was time to say our goodbyes demonstrated how much we had grown together. It was such a blessing to meet people with open minds and heartwarming love. We all had different stories and perspectives, but were so supportive of one another.

Can you tell us how the CSSI experience has impacted you?

Adela:

This program has truly been a life-changing experience for me. Before this program, I didn't have any confidence in myself. I didn't think I was smart enough to do computer science. I didn't think that I would be able to create applications that could help people. I didn't think that I was able to present in front of an audience. But now I know that I can do all of these things and more. As long as I work smart, use all the resources at my disposal correctly, and build up my courage, I can do whatever I set my mind to.

Jessica:

At CSSI, I learned about imposter syndrome. What is that, you may ask? The feelings that make us feel unworthy, when in reality, we are qualified. Learning about this was huge for me, as I’ve often struggled with self-doubt.

I also gained communication skills, confidence, and of course, coding experience. Although my communication skills and confidence have a lot more to grow, this experience was a start that I feel really blessed to have enjoyed.

What are you going to miss most from your CSSI experience once you leave?

Adela:

I'm going to miss feeling like a valued part of a company. Going back to my regular job will be hard—it's just not the same as Google.

Jessica:

I’m going to miss the family that was created at the beginning of this new path of my life. The people around me made me feel like I was at home and loved, which is something that I find really valuable.

Today’s blog features Philip Haeusser, a PhD Research Intern at Google. Read on to learn about his projects, publishing at Google, coding, and his internship's impact. Enjoy!

So tell us about yourself and your PhD topic…

Hi! My name is Philip, and I’m a third-year PhD student in computer science at TU Munich, supervised by Daniel Cremers. I am working in the field of computer vision, the discipline where we teach computers to understand images and videos. To a computer, images and videos are nothing but a huge collection of meaningless numbers. If you represent them as colors, a human is immediately able to tell what’s in the picture.

In order to get a computer to achieve the same, I train neural networks — a family of models that can be interpreted as instances of a “mini visual cortex.” The goal is to map the many numbers that make up an image to something more meaningful, such as a class label like “cat.” Neural networks are amazing at this. I have worked on problems like optical flow (“what changes from one video frame to the next?”) or domain adaptation [“how can we use knowledge (labels) from one domain (e.g. handwritten images) on another domain (e.g. house numbers from Google street view)?”].

When I’m not doing research, I work on my YouTube channel “Phil’s Physics” where I present experiments and talk about science.

How did you get to work in this area?

In 2014, I was completing my Master’s in physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz. I was part of an interdisciplinary team working on retina implants for blind people. In one of our experiments, we had to deal with a lot of data that was very expensive to get — but we couldn’t use all of it because our data processing pipeline was not complex enough. So I started to read about machine learning and neural networks. I got immediately hooked and reached out to professors who were working in this area. It was a great honor to get invited to present my work to Daniel Cremers, who then offered me a PhD position at his chair.

Why did you apply for an internship at Google and how supportive was your PhD advisor?

The field of deep learning is moving very fast. Almost every week, a new paper on some new groundbreaking neural network or training trick appears. More often than not, the authors work at Google. That got me interested in the kind of work that Google is doing in this field. At a summer school, I met Olivier Bousquet, who gave an amazing talk about the Google Brain team. He told me about research internships at Google, and then I applied. My PhD advisor liked the idea, because it’s always good to get new perspectives, to connect with people and to engage in exchange, particularly in a new field like deep learning. Plus, Google has the resources to facilitate experiments that are computationally unfeasible at many universities.

What project was your internship focused on?

I had the honor to be working with Alexander Mordvintsev, one of the creators of DeepDream. The project was on a novel method of training neural networks with unlabeled data and semi-supervised learning.

We developed a new method that we called “Learning by Association.” It’s similar to the “association game,” where you’re told a word and you respond with the first thing that you associate with it. After a few “iterations,” you usually get very funny “association chains.”

We did something similar: We trained a neural network to produce representations (neural activation patterns) that allow for associations, too. Associations from labeled data to unlabeled data. Imagine an association chain from an example of the labeled batch to an example of the unlabeled batch. Then, you make a second association from unlabeled to labeled data. That would then be an “association cycle.” You can now compare the label of the example that you ended up at with the label of the example at the beginning of the cycle. The goal is to make consistent association cycles, meaning that the labels are the same. We formulated this as a cost function and showed that this technique works extremely well for training classification networks with less labeled data.

Did you publish at Google during your internship?

Yes, I wrote a paper and submitted it to CVPR, the biggest computer vision conference in the world. I even presented on this topic at the 2017 CVPR conference. And Google funded my conference trip, so this internship has not only brought me great industry experience, but also a publication that I am very proud of.

How closely connected was the work you did during your internship to your PhD topic?

My host and I were exploring many topics in the beginning and this particular one fits perfectly in my PhD. Besides, I think that even projects orthogonal to a PhD topic can help a lot, with regard to coding and project management skills.

Did you write your own code?

Tons! I am particularly grateful for the code reviews that helped me improve code quality and made me think more about style and scalability. I am also very happy that Google allowed me to open-source my code, as is common practice in the research world. This way, I can continue to work on the topic and share code with researchers all across the globe. I was able to write a follow-up paper on “Associative Domain Adaptation,” which just got accepted for ICCV.

This is your second internship at Google. What were the reasons to come back to Google Zurich?

There are so many interesting research projects at Google that only one internship is not enough :-). No, seriously, I was offered a really interesting project on the team of Sylvain Gelly. I had already met him and his colleagues last year. They are amazing people, and I couldn’t miss out on the chance to work with them.

What key skills have you gained from your time at Google?

I think my code quality improved a lot. At Google, you have the chance to learn from brilliant coders with a lot of experience. They write smart code, fast. And they help you do the same.

But I also connected with many people from different teams and backgrounds. I met amazing product managers who gave me insights into how they design successful products. I was even able to work with them on new YouTube features since I am also a YouTube creator. And last but not least, I worked on my metabolic endurance with the Tough Mudder team at Google’s internal fitness center.

What impact has this internship experience had on your PhD?

Looking at it in retrospect, my internship was an important milestone for my PhD. I didn’t apply with the expectation of it being a total game changer, but I think I returned back to university with a ton of new ideas and inspiration.

Looking back on your experiences now: Why should a PhD student apply for an internship at Google? Any advice to offer?

When you’re in the middle of your PhD, there will be this moment when you think you’re trapped and you need to see something new. Or when you realize that you would like to try an experiment that requires 1000 GPUs. Or when you think you know it all and you want to challenge yourself. Or when you think about the time after your PhD and you wonder what it would be like to write code at scale and make a huge impact. I think there are many reasons for an internship. Google is a fun place to try yourself out and maybe come home with a nice paper, new friends, new ideas, or even a job offer.

Welcome to the sixth installment of our blog series “My Path to Google.” These are real stories from Googlers highlighting how they got to Google, what their roles are like, and even some tips on how to prepare for interviews.

Today’s post is all about Zaven Muradyan. Read on!

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I was born in Armenia and lived there for about seven years before moving to Dallas, Texas. After several subsequent moves, I eventually ended up in the Tri-Cities area of Washington, where I went to the local community college to study computer science and graduated with an associate degree.

What’s your role at Google?

I'm a software engineer on the Google Cloud Console team, working on the frontend infrastructure. In addition to working on framework code that affects the rest of the project, I also work on tooling that improves other developers' productivity, with the ultimate goal of improving the experience for all users of Google Cloud Platform.

What inspires you to come in every day?

My colleagues! It's a joy to work on challenging and large-scale technical problems with so many talented and kind people, and I am able to learn from my coworkers every day. I also get to work with several open source projects and collaborate closely with the Angular team at Google.

When did you join Google?

I officially joined Google a little more than two years ago. I had always admired Google's product quality and engineering culture, but prior to starting the recruitment process, I had never seriously considered applying because I didn't feel like I had the formal credentials.

How did the recruitment process go for you?

It started, in a sense, when one year I decided to try participating in Google Code Jam just for fun (and I didn't even get very far in the rounds!). A little while later, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google who had seen some of my personal open source projects. To my surprise, they had originally found me because I had participated in Code Jam! I was excited and decided to do my best at going through the interview process, but was prepared for it to not work out.

I studied as much as I could, and tried to hone my design and problem solving skills. I wasn't quite sure what to expect of the interviews, but when the time came, it ended up being an enjoyable, although challenging, experience. I managed to pass the interviews and joined my current team!

What do you wish you’d known when you started the process?

Prior to going through the interviews, I had the idea that only highly educated or extremely experienced engineers had a chance at joining Google. Even after passing the interviews, I was still worried that my lack of a 4-year degree would cause problems. Having gone through the process, and now having conducted interviews myself, I can say that that is certainly not the case. Googlers are made up of people from all kinds of different backgrounds!

Do you have any tips you’d like to share with aspiring Googlers?

Don't assume that you won't be able to succeed just because you may have a "nontraditional" background! Go ahead and apply, then prepare well for the interviews. What matters most is your ability to problem solve and design solutions to complex issues, so keep practicing and don't give up.

Can you tell us more about the resources you used to prepare your interviews?

I started by going through "Programming Interviews Exposed," which acted as a good intro to my preparation. After that, I tried learning and implementing many of the most common algorithms and data structures that I could find, while going through some example problems from sites like Topcoder and previous iterations of Code Jam. Finally, one specific resource that I found to be very helpful was HiredInTech, especially for system design.

This year we introduced a new AdWords Certification award and algorithm evaluating performance across more campaign types, delivering some of the most impressive work seen in the history of GOMC. Check out our AdWords Business, AdWords Certification, and Social Impact Winners below, and reference our GOMC Past Challenges page for a full list of the 2017 Team Results.

Congratulations to the winners and a big round of applause for all teams that participated! Thanks to all of the support from professors and the thousands of students who have helped businesses and nonprofits in their communities, we have had much to celebrate together. Over the past 10 years, more than 120,000 students and professors across almost 100 countries have participated in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, helping more than 15,000 businesses and nonprofits grow online.

Though we are taking a step back from the Google Online Marketing Challenge as we know it and exploring new opportunities to support practical skill development for students, we are continuing to provide free digital skills trainings and encourage academics to keep fostering a learning environment that connects the classroom with industry. For resources that will help you carry on project work like GOMC, a place for sharing feedback to help us continue to provide useful student development programs and a way to stay updated on our latest offerings, visit our FAQ page on the GOMC website.